Rock Solid

Last Thursday during our professional development time I used the term Rock Solid to describe effective lessons.  I like this term for many reasons.

·         It has a feeling of permanence and strength.  Rock solid teaching means that day in and day out, students are engaged and learning.  This term speaks to consistency and strength.    

·         It rolls off the tongue nicely, and you can play with the words: I rocked the class, you rock, you are educational rock stars, I started off rocky and ended up solid….

·         It is what I want people to think of when they think of HSE.  Southeastern is the Rock of Gibraltar.  This is a place that provides solid instruction for our students and is an anchor for the community of Fishers.

Where We Are

You have finished the process of writing Class SLOs.  You are working to get students ready to reach the Mastery Content Score by the time semester final exams roll around, but most of your day-to-day focus is on planning, teaching, and grading.  Your efforts are focused on helping students.

This is exactly how it should be, and it is what Rock Solid teaching is all about.  You do the little things right every day.  You take care of details.  You make sure lessons are ready and the activities are thoughtful.  You find ways to push the top students and catch the ones who are falling.  You grade papers and get them back on time.  You call parents and contact counselors when needed.  This is rock solid teaching. 

On the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric, “Effective” is Rock Solid, and it is not easy.  It takes determination, effort, and perseverance.  It means doing the right things for the right reasons: because it helps students learn and grow.  That is, however, why you became a teacher.  And Rock Solid Teaching is the reason HSEHS is considered one of the top high schools in the state and in the nation.

You rock, HSE.

Have a great week.

Phil

I Taught My Dog to Whistle

Before reading further, think about this statement: The focus of our efforts at Hamilton Southeastern High School must be primarily on student learning rather than on teaching. 

About five years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Lindsay High School in the San Joaquin Valley, just south of Fresno, California. 

Lindsay is a school that is very different from Southeastern, but I met some outstanding and innovative educators on that visit.  They were working closely with Robert Marzano and Associates and were trying to turn around a school that by all accounts was struggling.  Perhaps the most daring move they made was to put every student on an individualized learning plan that included advancement and the granting of course credit based on performance.  Lindsay was all about what the student learned.

In fact, they didn't call the kids “students.”  They were “learners,” and the teachers were “learning facilitators.”  If you can get over the awkwardness of the titles, the intent is excellent.

For good reason, we tend to focus on what and how we are teaching.  This is not a bad thing.  We should always strive to improve our teaching.  In fact, I believe that the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric and the TEDS process emphasizes improved teaching.  The TER requires us to be very, very intentional and reflective about what we teach and how we teach it.

The issue is, of course, that regardless of how we teach it, if the students don’t learn it, we haven’t really accomplished much.  This is exactly why the TER pushes so hard for monitoring student progress.  Monitoring progress is found all over the rubric:

·         Competency 1.2: Set measurable achievement goals

·         Competency 1.4: Create objective-driven lesson plans and assessments

·         Competency 1.5: Track student data and analyze progress

·         Competency 2.1: Develop student understanding and mastery of lesson objectives

·         Competency 2.4: Check for understanding

·         Competency 2.5: Modify instruction as needed

I’ll give you hint: Don’t wait for the final exam to check how students are doing on your Class Student Learning Objective.  This semester, it will pay dividends for your students—and for you—to give multiple formative assessments.  Formative assessments are those that students complete without risk.  They may or may not be formal assessments.  (Note the difference between “formative” and “formal.”) 

Formative assessments tell you if your teaching is resulting in student learning.  It gives you a chance to adjust instruction.

John Hattie, a widely published education professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said, “The mistake I was making was seeing feedback as something teachers provide to students….It was only when I discovered that feedback was most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher that I started to understand it better.”  He is talking about formative assessments--feedback from the students to the teacher.

The trouble with formative feedback, however, is that it requires you to adjust your teaching to meet the needs of the learner and supports Robert Marzano’s interesting take on how often you should give formative assessments.  His response to that question:  “As often as you are willing to change your instruction.”

It’s true that we may not be able to teach a dog to whistle, but we certainly can improve student performance when we know exactly what they need in order to take the next step.  Avoid whistling in the dark, HSE.  Check often where students are in their learning, and then make adjustments to ensure they reach the learning targets.

Have a great week.

Phil

An Arranged Marriage

As often as I can I listen to StoryCorps on National Public Radio.  One of the episodes that still comes to mind occasionally has to do with arranged marriages.  A daughter-in-law who did not have an arranged marriage interviews her mother-in-law whose marriage was arranged.  Sulochana Konur tells the story of how two months after meeting her future husband at the age of 15, she was married.  Almost 40 years later, they remain so.

At the end of the interview, Mrs. Konur gives advice to her daughter-in-law.  These aren’t the exact words, but I think this is the point she makes: I didn’t make the choice to marry, but that doesn’t make it easier or harder.  You will also have to find your own way.  As you are married, you have to grow together regardless of how you became married.  I’ll return to this concept later.

Set High Expectations for Academic Success: Rock Solid Teaching

The last competency on the TER is Competency 2.9.  It is interesting because it seems to repeat many other areas in the rubric, especially when you examine only the “Effective” category.  Look at these indicators and note some of the connections to other competencies:

Effective

·         Teacher sets high expectations for students of all levels. Similar to: 2.1—Mastery and understanding of lesson objectives, 2.5—Teacher does not give up, 2.6—Accessible but Rigorous Work

·         Students are invested in their work and value academic success as evidenced by their effort and quality of their work.  Similar to: 2.3—Engagement, 2.6—Student perseverance, 2.7—Students on task, 2.8—Students are invested in the success of their peers

·         The classroom is a safe place to take on challenges or risk failure.  Similar to: 2.8—Safe and positive environment, 2.5—Teacher scaffolds students

·         Teachers expect students to respond to questioning and to generate their own conclusions. Similar to: 2.2—Students ask higher-order questions, 2.4—Teacher checks for understanding, 2.6—Students are required to support arguments,

·         Teacher celebrates and/or recognizes high quality work.  Similar to: 2.6—Teacher highlights student work that meets high expectations, 2.8—Positive classroom environment

Certainly, this overlap of competencies reinforces what I have been saying about how the same lesson can have multiple “hits” on the TER.  Make no mistake about it: An “Effective” lesson is rock solid teaching.   If your lesson is effective, it will show up in this competency and many other places on the rubric. 

The indictors for “Highly Effective,” however, go beyond rock solid.  Take a look at the “Highly Effective” indicators for 2.9:

Highly Effective: For Level 4, much of the Level 3 evidence is observed during the year, as well as some of the following:

·         Students participate in forming academic goals for themselves and analyzing their progress.

·         Student comments and actions demonstrate that they are excited about their work and understand the relevance of their learning.

To reach “Highly Effective” on this competency, students must do much of the work.  They must set academic goals and analyze their own progress.  This is not a new concept.  It has been around for as long as I have been teaching and probably long before that.  In the late 90s and early 00s, the Best Practice folks (Zemmelman, Daniels, and Hyde) were pushing for it, and more recently, Robert Marzano has documented the impact of student involvement in setting and tracking learning goals.

Most students, however, will not be able to do this on their own.  These are skills that must be taught, but it is time well spent.  When I first started as an administrator, I worked with a teacher who took this process to heart.  He developed learning goals for his students who were predominantly at-risk and low achievers, taught them to develop their own academic goals, and had them track their own progress.  He also had students track the correlation between effort and results.  The outcomes of this informal field-test were overwhelmingly positive.  Students became more invested in their learning, they consistently worked harder and performed better, they became aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, and they saw the correlation between effort and results.  It was hard and sometimes frustrating work, but it changed the teacher’s approach to teaching.

My point:  You will “hit” in the “Effective” category on this competency with lots of different activities.  In order to trend up this competency from “Effective” to “Highly Effective,” a teacher must do much more than set goals and tell students what they are.  It will involve teaching students to set their own goals and monitor their own learning.  It means finding ways to get students invested in the learning because it has personal meaning and relevance.

An Arranged Marriage:

That is it, Southeastern.  We have made it through all nine competencies in Domain 2 of the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric.  Yes, this was an arranged marriage, but I think we may learn to love her/him yet!  (I told you I would get back to you on this one.)

Now begins the work of growing together. 

Have a great week.

Phil

It's No Joke

Competency 2.8: Create a safe and positive classroom environment in a culture of respect and collaboration

This past week a teacher sent me a great—and timely—article from the editorial pages of the New York Times on the links between childhood trauma and adult outcomes.  If you get a chance, click on the following link and read the short editorial and focus on the significance of a safe and positive classroom to a student who has had any type of trauma as a child: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/opinion/brooks-the-psych-approach.html?hp 

Here is the kicker: I contend that sitting in all of our classrooms, whether we know it are not, are students who fit this description.  For these students, a safe and positive classroom is not just a good idea; it is essential for them to learn.

What does a safe and positive classroom actually look like?  What would an observer see and be able to document in a room that has a culture of respect and collaboration?  These are the questions that must be answered in order to score this competency.

I have intentionally stayed away from the “Improvement Necessary” and “Ineffective” indicators during these emails about the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric, but today I am going to make an exception.  I want to make two points, one focusing on the negative and one focusing on the positive.  Then I will end with the indicators for this competency.  I am very interested in hearing your feedback on this topic, so let me know what you think after you have finished reading.

The Negative: Sarcasm

One of the indicators in the “Ineffective” category speaks directly to sarcasm, and many of the others refer to respect and collaboration, or rather lack thereof.  I will deal with collaboration and respect in the next section, but I want to make one point about sarcasm.  The longer I am in education, the more convinced I am that sarcasm has no place in school.  I want to state that as clearly as I can because I recognize that some of you may disagree. 

Sarcasm is so prevalent, so ubiquitous, in mass and social media that we may find it easy to overlook the dangers.  Sarcasm takes the format of a joke, and it gets laughs, so it seems harmless.  The reality is, however, that sarcasm only “works” if it embarrasses someone.  Furthermore, it has tremendous potential to be misunderstood because it always contains a “hidden message.”  The students most likely to misunderstand the intent of the sarcastic statement are those students who process information slowly, have different language or cultural backgrounds, or have trouble inferring (such as a student on the autism spectrum). 

Even if a student isn’t the direct target of the sarcasm, many students will internalize the embarrassment and will choose to avoid risks.  All of us have experienced times where we hoped someone was joking but we weren’t sure.  What we are most likely to do in a case like this is to shut down and avoid drawing attention to our lack of understanding, which is the last thing we want to happen with students in our classes. 

I am aware of the counter-arguments, and you may be able to convince me that sarcasm between two equals is appropriate.  The problem is, of course, that teachers and students are not equals.  For good reason, there is an imbalance of power.  So I have come to the conclusion that when sarcasm is used in school two things happen: First, if you choose to use it, it will, eventually and inevitably be misunderstood and come back to bite you.  Second, it will hurt students you least suspect and in ways you can’t guess. 

Okay, I will now step off my soapbox….

The Positive: Respect and Collaboration

Not long into my teaching career, I came to the unsettling realization that as a teacher I cannot make students do anything.  (By the way, I learned this lesson again when I became an administrator.) It was a bit of a shock, but it did change my perspective.  Certainly, I can encourage, nudge, create consequences, and influence choices, but the bottom line is that everyone, including students, has free will.  This is not to say that we should lower our expectations, but rather emphasizes that we will have much better results with the positive approach that keeps students with us and does not create an adversarial relationship

Creating a safe and positive classroom environment is all about intentionally being in the learning process with the students.  One of the catch phrases in education right now is Professional Learning Communities.  The phrase may be overused, but the concept is absolutely correct.  Southeastern High School is and should be a learning community—for students and teachers.  This competency is about creating the feeling of community in your classroom.  When you make known that your room is a place where the students and the teacher live and work together, and it is a good place to be, you are trending up on the rubric.  The brain research is crystal clear and reinforced by the Times editorial mentioned earlier: If students do not feel safe, they learn less.  Creating a feeling of safety must be a top priority for all of us.

What do you do to make your classroom feel like a community, a place where you are on the learning journey with and for each other?  Look at the indicators below.  Focus on the key words and phrases: respect, collaboration, rapport, genuine interest, invested. As an experienced observer, I can tell you that it is relatively easy to see and document mutual respect in a classroom.  It is clear by comments and actions when students are invested in the success of their peers, and it is obvious when a teacher is genuinely interested and likes his or her students.

Here are the Indicators for 2.8:

Effective

·         Teacher creates and maintains a safe and positive classroom environment that is conducive to learning.

·         Students are respectful of their teacher and peers.

·         Students are given the opportunities to collaborate and support each other in the learning process.

·         Teacher reinforces positive character and behavior and uses consequences appropriately to discourage negative behavior.

·         Teacher has a good rapport with students, and shows genuine interest in their thoughts and opinions.

·         Teacher demonstrates a genuine interest in student academic goals and activities outside of school.

Highly Effective

·         Teacher models respect and demonstrates positive character traits.

·         Students are invested in the academic success of their peers as evidenced by unprompted collaboration and assistance.

·         Students reinforce positive character and behavior and discourage negative behavior amongst themselves.

Send me your responses, Southeastern.  Sarcastic or otherwise, I am interested to hear your thoughts to both the positive and negative sections above.

Have a great week.

Phil